Susheela Raman is as well-travelled as her music. Born in England to south Indian parents in 1973, Raman moved to Australia aged four. Her mother was determined that the ancient traditions of the old country were to undertake the journey into the new world too.

"My mother's father was the priest of a village in Tamil Nadu, so she was well-versed in the rituals that go on there," she explains. "She used to play tapes of vedic recitations, and that's the first thing I remember hearing. She was my music teacher as a child and she was tough - she made sure that I practised every morning. It was only when I was a rebellious teenager and I discovered the great ladies - Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin - that I really started listening to anything other than Indian traditional music."

Now Raman lives in a flat in Notting Hill with Sam Mills, her producer and long-term musical collaborator, and tours the world, undertaking far-flung journeys of discovery, and meeting other musicians, from Siberian throat singers to Greek flautists, for potential collaborations.

The flat is light and welcoming, but sparsely decorated - it has the feel of a place only used in sporadic bursts. It was inevitable that Raman's own music would incorporate diverse influences. Her second album, Love Trap, finds a link with Indian sacred hymns and the pop scene of 70s Ethiopia, taking in jazz and soul touches along the way. The danger of world fusion is to wash out what makes each style idiosyncratic, but Love Trap maintains intensity and authenticity. "It's not difficult to find clear parallels in different traditions, and you can find the same scales being used all over the world," says Raman. "The nature of music is that it travels."

The unusual musical traditions of Ethiopia, currently one of Raman's great loves, are an example of this. In the late 1960s and early 70s, emperor Haile Selassie decreed that music could be made only for official purposes.

At the same time, US Peace Corps volunteers brought records by James Brown and Otis Redding, and, under state-sanctioned guises, the country's musicians produced their own form of groovy soul. Elements of West African pop and Middle-Eastern music also found their way in and, following the stationing of Ethiopian troops in a UN peacekeeping force in Korea, some sentimental Korean ballads got in there, too.

One of the greatest exponents of Ethiopian pop was Mahmoud Ahmet, a singer who wrote the original version of the song Love Trap. Ahmet has become known beyond the country's boundaries through the efforts of Franco Falceto, whose Ethiopiques series of CDs have been one of the surprise hits of recent years.

"The Ethiopian route wasn't expected. I was in a car in France with my manager, and this song came on," says Raman. "It sounded unfamiliar and I got obsessed with it. Then Sam and I went on a tour of Ethiopia. There are these huge churches, built in 1200, that are carved out of the side of mountains and which people still use for worship, but with a strange form of orthodox Christianity that I've never come across before. They play a kind of music called Anchi hoye, using a harp-like instrument that sounds like a tampura [Indian lute that produces a background drone]. So I've been trying to find everything I can about Ethiopian music since."

Another of Raman's interests are padams; ancient erotic songs from India that were composed and sung by high priestesses called Dev Dasis. "From around 900AD, there was a system where these priestesses did all the rituals in the temples. They were also artists, and allowed to sleep with whomever they wanted. They were well-versed in music, philosophy and art, and they wrote pieces that describe making love to a man in graphic detail."

Anyone hoping for an afternoon's enlightenment with a Dev Dasi will be disappointed. There are only two left, both in their 90s. But padams are still performed by the singer Aruna Sairam, who recently released a CD called Inde De Sud. "After the British came, it was decided that these women were prostitutes and they were subsequently persecuted by their own people. Now they're not allowed to perform. Victorian values were instilled very successfully in India, unfortunately."

Last year, Raman travelled to Tanjore in south India to study hymns written in devotion to Shaivite saints between 700 and 900AD, one of which she used as the lyrics for her song Blue Lily Red Lotus. "It was a very deep experience," she says. "When you're working with pieces that are 1,000 years old you are inevitably tapping on something very strong, and these hymns had never been performed outside of the temples before. I don't know what the people of Tanjore make of me doing this."

More recent music that has made it into Raman's CD collection. Yat-Kha are a band from Tuva in Mongolia led by Albert Kuvezin, a throat singer who was thrown out of the school choir as a child and told never to sing again. He discovered Deep Purple, and decided to give throat singing another go, with a rock influence.

"We've been bumping into Yat-Kha at various festivals, and got talking," says Raman. "They're lovely people, and they have to travel 11 hours by car to get to an airport, so the fact that they're touring is impressive."

Finally, there is Björk. "A huge inspiration to me, just for the way she opens up boundaries and makes anything seem possible. She is very courageous indeed."